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Philip Radford wrote: > > Does anyone know of any performance bottlenecks or other technical issues > when sending out mass email from a server. Typically 1000 messages at a > time. All emails are sent on a opt-in basis. 1000 at a time, I thought you said "mass email" ;) What frequency? A 1000 at a time once a day is very different to say a thousand every 2 seconds. > Will this have any performance issues on the rest of the system in terms of > apache, mysql etc.. when a mailing is being sent. Potentially yes, but I've had email runs of 1000, where I've gone "oops" and looked at the queue to see if I could stop any of it, and the bulk have already been delivered a few seconds later <eek>. Probably most likely is I/O bottlenecks, if those other services require to do a lot of writes. But even then one can tune Postfix down to a limited number of processes. Unless you want to do this 1000 many times an hour you'll be fine with that 386, and the 10MBps IDE drives (I assume all email servers have mirroring - right?). > I have already set up SPF records on all domains on this server and > implemented reverse DNS lookups so that services such as spamcop etc can be > assured that messages are coming from a finite source and not being hijacked > by another server. > > Any other comments or ideas? VERP Offloading the mail delivery bit to your ISP or other commercial provider (Hey call me cheap, but I use to do this for mailing list runs when I was strung off a V90 modem, my bandwidth 56Kbps, Demon Internets email server bandwidth probably gigabits) if the delivery bit becomes a strain. Always good to have a backup plan ;) Running your own email server is hardwork, and it is even harder doing bulk runs when everything out there is paranoid that you might be sending unsolicited email. No really, AOL and Hotmail are quiet capable of blocking, and in hotmails case, silently deleting, email if it looks just a little too spam-like. One of the advantages of offloading to a big ISP is that they may have white listing arrangement with these big email providers. At AOL you can get a feedback loop (SCOMP). Hotmail you can get SDS (or whatever it is called at MSN, although I never completed the sign-up correctly). The main advantage of which is you can unsubscribe people who think your email is spam, and avoid the reputation hit of them clicking the spam button next time. Most email servers default to settings suitable for preserving email - whatever - where as for some types of bulk email, failure to deliver every single message is a non-issue as long as most make it. Does your bulk email fall into this category? Consider outsourcing as well - there are specialists out there. Simon *(well if it does non-trivial volumes of email, running a single standalone one like the technocool.net mx is virtually no work at all, but it doesn't do any forwarding or big mailing lists or anything messy) -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html